As Morrison notes, the 23-year-old Gale is a member of the wealthy Las Vegas Greenspun family, and recently purchased a $1 million home in California. When she was arrested on a trespassing and disturbing the piece charges at an animal rights protest, however, she demanded a public defender. The public defender negotiated a plea bargain for her which resulted in a sentence of community service, but when Gale never bothered to show up in court to enter that plea, a bench warrant for her arrest was issued.

Gale has been a part of Last Chance for Animal’s protests against the family of Mitchell Lardner in Monrovia, which this site has covered in detail. Lardner is a manager at Sumitomo Corporation, which has been targeted by animal rights activists due to its ties with Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Protests at Lardner’s home have involved threats and someone chucking a brick in the face of an off-duty police officer that the Lardner’s had hired as a security guard.

Like many activists, Gale is willing to threaten others, but carefully hides for fear of being targeted herself. Morrison writes,

Third, she has no qualms about standing outside a private home chanting the threat: “For the animals we will fight! We know where you sleep at night.” Yet she asked me not to reveal her address. (She said she has been threatened and didn’t want people to know where she lives).

. . .

Gale was one of the protesters who stood outside Lardner’s home May 23 and chanted, “Hey, Mitchell, what you say? How many animals died today?”

As police stood by, one protester yelled, “Your police aren’t always going to be here.” Lest this sound like an empty threat, on May 29 an off-duty police officer hired to protect the Lardner home was struck in the face with a brick, breaking his jaw, said Monrovia police Detective Rob Wilken.

A number of animal rights groups in California have banded into a new statewide coalition, the California Animal Association, to “represent the interest of animals at the [California] state capitol.”

A press release sent out by the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights announcing the formation of the group said,

After more than a year of planning, CAA was formed to bring a stronger and more cohesive voice for animal protection to Sacramento. Many of the animal welfare and animal rights groups involved in CAA have individually or in small groups worked on legislation to strengthen animal protection laws or to defeat legislation that weakens protections for animals with California.

The members of the coalition include: American Anti-Vivisection Society, Animal Legislative Action Network, Animal Place, Animal Protection Institute, Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights, California Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection League, California Lobby for Animal Welfare, Doctors for Kindness to Animals, Farm Sanctuary, In Defense of Animals, Last Chance for Animals, Orange County People for Animals, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The Paw Project, United Animal Nations, United Poultry Concerns and Viva! USA.

Last Chance for Animals and San Diego Animal Advocates garnered some press earlier this month in a transparent publicity attempt — the two groups offered a reward of up to $30,000 for evidence of animal cruelty at the Salk Institute.

In a press release announcing the offer, the San Diego Animal Advocates said,

In conjunction with the Los Angeles-based group Last Chance for Animals, SDAA is offering a reward of $20,000 for information leading to the conviction on animal cruelty charges of a principal investigator and the Salk Institute in San Diego, after our groups were tipped by an anonymous source that animals are being mistreated.

. . .

We will also offer a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to official sanctions and termination of grants and research projects at Salk for animal abuse. These rewards are necessary to expose the truth because employees are threatened with loss of their jobs.

Last Chance for Animals Chris De Rose said in a prepared statement,

Salk officials have refused to meet with us to discuss the information we received. So now we are going directly to the employees who are witnessing this cruelty and asking them to help us expose it.

Jane Cartmill of San Diego Animal Advocates hints at the real reason behind this little stunt, complaining in a prepared statement about a recent $7 million donation to the Salk Institute by Qualcomm President and CEO Irwin Jacobs. The money will be used to fund the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology. According to a Salk Institute press release,

The goal of the center will be to help Salk scientists organize the wealth of information that is now available about the genes and proteins that regulate nerve cell activity as well as the networks of nerve cells that regulate brain function. Named to honor Salk Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the center will build upon Crick’s important work during the past two decades centering on consciousness and cognitive processing within the brain.

. . .

The center will allow computational biologists to mine the enormous amount of data on the composition of genes and proteins in the brain as well as the neural networks that regulate information processing. The ultimate goal will be to generate theoretical models to explain how the brain works, which then will be tested in Salk laboratories by experimental neuroscientists. To advance this work, the institute is in the process of recruiting up to four new faculty members to staff the center.

Cartmill is horrified at that prospect, saying that, “Brain-mapping experiments are among the most devastating to animals and involve tremendous deprivation and suffering.”

But apparently not so horrified as to bother to discuss his allegations with the Salk Institute. A Salk Institute spokesman told NBCSandiego.Com that it had tried to contact the group about the allegations but received no reply,

The Salk Institute takes all allegations of animal abuse seriously. On Oct. 22, the Salk Institute requested the San Diego Animal Advocates provide in writing the specifics of their unsubstantiated allegations about animal abuse. To this date, the institute has not received a response to its request.

In May, animal rights groups lost their bid to prevent the Los Angeles Zoo from moving a 42-year-old female African elephant to the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee.

Los Angeles resident Catherine Doyle had sued to get a temporary restraining order blocking the move, but the zoo moved the elephant two days before the scheduled hearing on the restraining order.

Animal rights groups that had opposed the move, including The Humane Society of The United States (HSUS), In Defense of Animals, Last Chance For Animals and Venice Animal Allies Foundation, blasted the move. In a joint press release, the groups complained,

In its attempt to keep [elephants] Ruby and Gita together, Doyle’s lawsuit accuses the Los Angeles Zoo of violating public policy and trust, as well as the California Administrative Procedure Act. It does not cite any violation of the Endangered Species Act. This outrageous ploy on the part of the zoo and the L.A. City attorney was a blatant delaying tactic designed to leave Ruby’s fate in legal limbo and enabled the zoo to carry out their plan of transferring Ruby to the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee, regardless of the elephants’ mutual welfare.

“I believe the L.A. Zoo, with Mayor Hahn’s endorsement, has shown its true colors with this covert operation of moving Ruby under the cover of darkness over a holiday weekend,” declares Gretchen Wyler, VP HSUS Hollywood Office. “The zoo has resorted to reprehensible legal maneuvering to achieve its intractable goal of separating these elephants, and like thieves in the night, has spirited away city property from the residents of Los Angeles.”

“Shame on the zoo for sneaking Ruby away in chains in the middle of the night, taking her away from her home and her best friend, while our request for a temporary restraining order was to be ruled on today,” states Yael Trock, the attorney for the plaintiff Catherine Doyle. “We are not giving up on this and intend to take further legal action.”

The Los Angeles Zoo moved the elephant because the Knoxville Zoo has an interest in developing an African elephant breeding program whereas the L.A. Zoo is in the process of focusing on Asian elephants in a process that could eventually lead to a breeding program as well.

The Animal Liberation NSW site has an interesting interview with Last Chance for Animals president Chris DeRose. DeRose has long been a supporter and advocate of Animal Liberation Front-style terrorism, and in his interview reveals that he also thinks it is just great if the animal rights movement’s cause is advanced through violent physical attacks on individuals,

Claudette: A perceived downside to direct action is “Does the movement want to engage in a battle of opposition with governments who have unlimited ability to suppress us?” When you say “engage against the opposition” do you mean physically? Like bodily harm or property damage?

Chris: You know I always try to say that certain activities like bombings or arson — I always stay away from those things only because they are uncontrollable. There are things that I am against personally but I’ve seen them done and they have worked. For example the Managing Director of HLS in England was beaten and that put the fear of whatever into those people. It did start to shake up what was going on over there. I think the man that did it got 3 to 5 years but something like that, I think, had an effect. Now am I endorsing that? Not publicly.

If it happens and it works, then that’s great.

Ah, that famous animal rights brand of compassion on display once again. Oddly enough, later in his interview DeRose laments,

Other countries are following suit. We have created here in the States, two generations of monsters. We have done it because of what we teach them in schools. We teach them how to take living things and vivisect. We teach them to become desensitized rather than being compassionate.

Yeah, because they would never get the idea from the animal rights movement that it’s okay to firebomb buildings and violently attack people, now would they?

Much of the interview is filled with DeRose talking about how he plans and participates in illegal activities. For example, DeRose says,

If everybody follows doing their specific job that they wanted to do that will determine what makes a great direct action. I think it is also important when you look at individuals to take into consideration what that individual can do — what they are best suited to. I seldom ever just let anybody do exactly what they want to do, especially if they are not really appropriate for that specific job. I try to, if that’s what they want to do, but if it doesn’t work then I have to move them to another place. If that person is really in it for the animals they won’t mind. I mean we do group discussions and brainstorming sessions. The person in charge is aware of what each person can do and takes in everything of what they are saying. That’s what makes a good operation.

Say, if we are going to do a break-in at a chickery and we start talking to each other and somebody else has an opinion — “I think if we went down Old Man So and So’s farm on the back road it would be faster…” then, you know, the person who is putting this altogether is listening and taking it all in. At the end there will be a specific clear plan of what needs to be done.

Last Chance for Animals is a tax-exempt nonprofit. Doesn’t sound like its engaged in legitimate charitable activities.

The California Milk Advisory Board has been running ads featuring cows in fields with tag lines like, “Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California.” Last Chance for Animals filed a complaint against the ads a few months ago, claiming that the ads “deliberately mislead the public, as they do not reflect the horrendous conditions in which California’s dairy cows actually live.”

The animal rights group sent undercover footage of a couple dairies to the California Attorney Generals’s Office that the group claims prove that “the cows … are anything but ‘happy.'”

In a press release announcing the complaint, Last Chance for Animals urged activists to “please ask the Attorney General’s Office to issue an injunction against the CMAB, disseminate a retraction, and enforce a criminal penalty against the company.”